Is a spoiler-markup-only edit to this answer acceptable?

Question

I saw this answer: https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/a/15595/4558

I was going to edit it to add spoiler markup only (since it's short, readable, and hard to avoid reading), but I searched meta first because I wasn't sure what the spoiler tag etiquette is here.

I first found Should we accept edits that only insert spoiler markup?, which indicated back in June of 2014 that no consensus on spoiler tag usage had been reached yet, and such edits are generally too minor.

From there I also found a general discussion of spoilers in answers at What's the etiquette of answering a 'challenge' (suggestion). No clear consensus seems to have been reached yet.

Based on the above, I did not make the edit. My questions are:

• In the specific answer I linked to above, should it have been answered with spoilers?
• If so, would a spoiler-only edit have been acceptable for that answer?

Also, in general, I'm also wondering if a consensus has been reached in the past year, although I kind of hesitantly ask that here as that discussion should probably be continued in the general etiquette discussion that already exists.

I have no strong opinion either way on the specific linked answer above or the topic in general. Mostly I'm just trying to get a feel for where this site currently stands by looking at this particular example, and the existing discussions I found are old enough that a consensus may have been reached since then.

Answer 1

In this post, I am speaking as a user, not a moderator.

I don't think such edits should be made. Some users prefer to spoiler-tag all of their answers, and some prefer never to use spoiler tags; however, there is no official policy. Hence, when in doubt, respecting the author's preference generally seems like the best decision.

Of course, when the answer contains a blatant spoiler in bold allcaps letters, or on the flip side when the answer consists entirely of spoilers (even parts that don't have anything to do with the solution), the post should be edited. More often than not, save for exceptional cases such as these (which usually deserve editing for other reasons anyway), I see no reason why a post should be edited exclusively to add or remove spoiler tags.